August 26, ESPN: "The news reports, I can tell you, are not entirely accurate. There
is a process that is still ongoing. The process isn't completed. When
the process is completed and there's an announcement to be made,
everybody will be made aware," Mike Ouellet, the NHLPA's chief of
business affairs, told reporters at the conclusion of the World Hockey
Summit on Thursday. "As far as the timeline goes, the expectations and
hope is that something is in place by training camp.

"For the
reports to come out and say an offer has been accepted is, to say the
least, a little premature given the process. No recommendation has been
made [by the selection committee] to the executive board yet."

The
NHLPA hired Fehr to come on as an unpaid consultant to help rewrite its
constitution and assist in the search for a new executive director.
Fehr, 61, was head of the MLB players union from 1983 to 2009, and was
considered a hard-line negotiator.

"He's got a tremendous wealth
of experience in this area," Ouellet said. "I don't think there's
anybody on the planet who has the type of experience he has working for a
professional sports union. That's been very valuable for the players as
they've worked through the process through the last year."

As Yahoo Sports' Nicholas J. Cotosnika notes, the NHLPA's search committee still has to complete the formal process of choosing Fehr:

August 26, Yahoo Sports: Fehr still needs the official recommendation of the NHLPA's five-player search committee: Jamie Langenbrunner, Brian Rolston, Ryan Getzlaf, Mathieu Schneider and Brian Rafalski. Langenbrunner told reporters Wednesday he expected a recommendation in the next week or so.

The five players "are reviewing the materials that have been sent in and the materials that they've received from potential candidates," Ouellet said. "They've been doing that for months, and they're coming close to the end of the process, but the process isn't completed yet."

Ouellet had this to say about the absence of an executive director at the World Hockey Summit:

"I think it's always important to have leadership in your
organization that can reassure people on what they're doing and help chart the
path, to open the doors of the league on a number of issues that we have
frankly put on the back burner," Ouellet said. "What we've been talking about the past couple of days -
Olympic participation and the World Cup - are examples of things that probably
should have been advanced beyond the stage they are today, and having a leader
would have helped those discussions."

Something tells me that not even Moses could have parted the sea of BS spewed at the WHS...

Just as the Globe and Mail's Eric Duhatschek reported that NHLPA deputy commissioner Bill Daly actually supports the presumptive hiring to some extent, and the Ottawa Sun's Chris Stevenson confirms--but Daly offered a caveat that counters Ouellet's assertion to Cotsonika that the PA has, "Done quite well, I think" despite not having an executive director in place:

August 26, Ottawa Sun: "It really doesn’t matter who’s in the seat. Somebody has to be in
the seat," he said. "He has a track record. It is what it is. We’ll deal
with whoever it is and hopefully make decisions jointly in the best
interests of the game."

...

Daly said it was more significant the players association, which has
been without an executive director since Paul Kelly and the union parted
ways a year ago, is getting close to having a leader in place.

"It’s clearly important to have a union that’s fully staffed,
efficient and effective as possible," he said. "No disrespect, but
they’re operating by committee right now."

Perhaps most stunningly, Toronto Maple Leafs GM Brian Burke, who's one of Gary Bettman's strongest allies, had this to say about the probable hiring to the Canadian Press's Sean Fitz-Gerald:

August 26, Canadian Press:"In my mind, a strong union is better for us as a sport
than a fractured union," Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Brian Burke
said. "If that's the choice they've made, I respect Donald Fehr. And I
think it's good news if they've put a leader in place."

...

"I always assume that the guy on the other side of the table's going
to give us a hard battle [in 2012]," Burke said. "That's what they get paid to do.
But I think we have a pretty good leader on our side, too."

Put simply?

"You really need an effective union structure in place to be able to
communicate with your players," Daly told reporters Thursday. "We can do
it and we do it to the extent we can, one on one. But there are over
700 players in the league, so you really do need an effective union
structure to conduct your business efficiently and effectively, and
that's hopefully what the conclusion of this process will bring."

August 26, National Post: [H]e is a real fighter, even if it is not yet clear what hockey has to
fight about that is worth a lockout. In March, after dazzling a room
full of NHL agents, Fehr mused about a hard salary cap — “Yes, that
would be a new thing for me. It’s not something that I heretofore
thought was appropriate for baseball players, that’s for sure” — and the
necessary reconstruction of the NHLPA.

“Obviously, they have a
bit of a leadership vacuum at the very top,” he said. “Obviously they
lost a lot of senior people … so there’s a lot of work to do. Having
said that, this is not like starting from scratch. So are there
some challenges ahead? Sure there are. Is there some work to do? Sure
there is. Is there a lot of room for optimism? Yeah, I think so.”

Optimism?
We’ll see. Baseball, stung by its near-death experience in 1994, has
experienced 16 years of Fehr-abetted labour peace. Hockey, five years
out, should do the same. The path will be determined by Gary Bettman,
and it will be determined by Donald Fehr. Book your plans for 2012
accordingly.

As for the blunt-as-five-bricks-through-your-window Jim Kelley, writing for Sports Illustrated this time around (again per Kukla's), suggests that Richard Bloch's ruling on Ilya Kovalchuk's contract (yes, says Dmitry Chesnokov, the NHL's blanket refusals of every Devils contract proposal have Kovalchuk considering playing in the KHL again) equaled the NHLPA getting kicked around on the playground by the school bully while crying, and between the Kovalchuk mess and the fact that Bettman's endorsed the Chicago Blackhawks' "loaning" of Cristobal Huet to a European team (for the record, Huet's $6 million drops off the Hawks' books but still counts against the "players' share," and will be paid via escrow withholdings), the PA needed to get its act together, fast:

August 26, Sports Illustrated: Fehr had developed something of a reputation with the "contest
everything" crowd. You can see it in his fundamental dealings with Major
League Baseball and his longtime association with [former NHLPA executive director Bob] Goodenow as a kitchen
cabinet-type adviser when Fehr led the baseball players and Goodenow
was in charge of the hockey players. The two are known to have spoken
often and, according to some in the PA, Goodenow modeled his approach to
NHL owners based on Fehr's tactic of never conceding a point without at
least an attempt to get something in return. Fehr has been
an unpaid adviser to the NHLPA for nearly a year and appears to have
been able to herd its various factions into at least understanding the
problems they face heading into the next major collective bargaining
negotiation in 2012 and the need to start preparing for it now. In
short, Fehr has spent a remarkable amount of time working on unifying
the PA just to get it to the point that it could recommend a new
director. Now that he appears to have their support, it's likely he'll
have to work even harder to keep it and build a base that will support
unified union goals in the upcoming negotiations.

According
to several sources, all of whom asked for anonymity because they were
not authorized to speak to the issue, Fehr won the support of the
executive committee because of his track record as a winner with the
baseball players union, and his willingness to challenge authority. One
went so far as to say the recent Kovalchuk ruling was the tipping point.

"It's
hard to imagine that Bob (Goodenow) would have allowed that to happen
and he (Fehr) is cut from the same cloth," a player said. "From what we
heard from him, we felt we had to be more proactive in defending
ourselves on issues that give the league an advantage that didn't seem
to be in the CBA."

I don't necessarily agree with Kelley's suggestion that teams aren't signing veterans because they're still jittery about the Kovalchuk ruling--that has to do more with supply, demand and re-setting market values by making the 50 or so veteran players who fight for table scraps in late August and early September under the present CBA sweat--but I do agree that the NHLPA needed to get its arse in gear, and given the NHL's floating of "thought balloon" ideas about reducing the players' share of revenues, re-setting the salary marketplace by dropping the cap down by over $10 million and severely limiting contract lengths...

It's time for the PA to present a united front and get down to the damn business of negotiating a follow-on CBA as soon as Fehr takes office so that they can assure us that we'll have NHL hockey to watch in 2012. The players don't want to strike and they don't want to be locked out, and while Fehr's reputation scares the hell out of more than a few people, in this situation, he need not be feared.